TMC will get more than 200 seats

Just the day before of the election result of Lok Sabha, 2011 in West Bengal, I projected a preview. In that report I had stated that TMC could get 28 to 32 seats in poll fray. I have some consternation. Before the election, some people worried about the forthcoming result. They thought that TMC govt. and its leader Mamata Banerjee would face a tough fight because of the understanding among her oppositions. May be she would lose her popularity facing combined opposition. In 2009 Lok Sabha, TMC won 19-20 seats and became an influential force in Parliament. INC was the political ally of TMC then. After that election, the Red Bastion of West Bengal was overthrown ending the rule of nearly three decades and half. TMC came to the power. After that, in Goebbelsian style, anti-Mamata campaign was orchestrated in a such malignant way, even many supporters of Mamata Banerjee worried about her fate. Some of them forecasted that TMC would get mere 14 Lok Sabha seats. Who were very much optimist, they told TMC-without-alliance would fetch all of the Congress seats. According to their views, after the split in INC, Indira Gandhi led her own chunk and later that became the mainstream of Congress. As well as Mamata’s TMC also has emerged as the Congress’s main force in West Bengal. So Congress party’s mass support base would shift unto TMC’s fold and seat numbers will be higher. They hoped that TMC will get 25-26 seats. But poll result dumped every forecast and TMC get 34 seats. No pre-poll survey could imagine the result.

Poll survey is a scientific process. Pollsters survey on the basis of that process. However, in recent times, voters become habituated to play some tricks with them. So, pollsters have to lose the game, voters win. In this precondition, I surveyed on my own, however the process was not so ‘scientific’. I talked with the commoners in district level through the rural Bengal, heard their passing remarks and shared my views with almost twenty persons of various social strata who are very much interested about electors mood. So, with all those impressions I saw that TMC was going to won 35 seats. Then I hesitated and following some permutation-combinations I reached to 30. But then I forget Bapuji’s remark—‘Be not afraid’, and at last wrote about 28-32 seats.

About coming Assembly Elections, my bait is TMC will win more than 200 seats. But again, I am in crossroads. If I become courageous, I would write it will be more than 230. If that happens, be not astonished.

However, coming election is not the day after tomorrow’s call. May be, there will happen some ‘miracle’ through the oppositions peculiar bed-fellowship.

Till then, we have to wait.

The writer is the ex-Excutive Editor of the Bengali daily “Bartaman” and the ex-Associated Editor of the Bengali daily “Sambad Pratidin”